[From the journal of Captain Arthur Hastings]
In the long and often bewildering association I have had with Hercule Poirot, I have learned that his methods, while frequently opaque to a man of my more straightforward disposition, are invariably rooted in a deep and unshakable foundation of logic. In the days following the catastrophic betrayal of L, however, I witnessed something in my friend that I had never seen before: a profound and unsettling doubt, not in his own abilities, but in the very nature of the puzzle we had been sent to solve. The world, it seemed, had ceased to follow the rules, and for a man whose entire existence was dedicated to understanding those rules, it was a crisis of a most fundamental sort.
We had taken to walking in the evenings through a small, immaculately manicured park near our hotel. It was an oasis of tranquility in the heart of the city's relentless energy, a place of stone lanterns, manicured pines, and the gentle, hypnotic sound of water trickling over smooth stones in a koi pond. It was on one such evening, as the setting sun painted the sky in dramatic hues of orange and purple, that Poirot finally gave voice to the storm that had been raging behind his usually placid green eyes.
"It is the weapon, Hastings," he said, his voice a low, frustrated murmur as he stopped to stare at his own reflection in the dark, still water of the pond. "Always, in any case, one begins with the weapon. A gun, a knife, a poison… it is a tangible thing. It tells a story. It speaks of the killer's motive, his opportunity, his very nature. The brute uses a cudgel; the woman of subtlety, a poison with no taste. One follows the weapon, and it leads you to the hand that wielded it."
He turned to me, and in the fading light, I could see the deep, weary lines of strain around his eyes. "But here? We have no weapon. We have only the result. A man's heart, it stops. Voila. It is a magic trick. A thing of smoke and mirrors. For weeks, I have tried to force it into a box of logic. A secret sound frequency, a satellite that can induce a cardiac event, a chemical agent that leaves no trace. I have built a thousand theories, and they are all sandcastles, washed away by the tide of impossibility."
He began to walk again, his pace agitated. "Given the circumstances, Hastings… given the writing of the dead man… a logical mind, it is forced to consider the illogical. One must, for the sake of the investigation, entertain the notion of the supernatural. One must say, 'Very well, let us assume it is a magic trick.' But even a magician must be somewhere. Even a ghost must have a place from which to haunt. And that, mon ami, is the true problem. How does one take the first step towards a phantom? How does one serve a warrant on a ghost?"
He was genuinely distressed, his little grey cells locked in a battle with an enemy that refused to adhere to the known laws of the universe. I, as was so often the case, had little to offer in the way of intellectual comfort. My own mind was a muddle of confusion and a deep, abiding desire to be back in my comfortable flat in London.
"It's a frightful mess, Poirot," I agreed, trying to be of some support. "This Kira fellow, he just seems to be everywhere at once. It's as if we're just sitting about, waiting for him to pop up on our very own doorstep and announce himself."
I had meant it as a simple expression of our frustrating predicament. I had no idea that in my idle, thoughtless grumbling, I had just handed my friend the key to a locked and bolted door.
Poirot stopped dead in the middle of the path. He froze so suddenly that a young couple walking behind us had to swerve to avoid him. He turned to me, his eyes, which moments before had been clouded with doubt, now blazing with a green fire of such intensity it was almost frightening. A slow, brilliant, utterly triumphant smile spread across his face.
"Hastings…" he breathed, his voice a reverent whisper. "My dear, dear friend. Sometimes, the foolishness of the brave man is worth more than the wisdom of a thousand scholars." He seized my shoulders, his grip surprisingly strong. "You are a genius! An absolute, unmitigated genius!"
"I am?" I stammered, entirely bewildered. "What did I say?"
"'Waiting for him to pop up on our very own doorstep!'" he quoted, his voice electric with excitement. "Mais oui! Of course! We have been waiting for the mountain to come to us! It is the height of arrogance! We will not wait, Hastings. We will make the mountain come. We will not wait for Kira to appear on our doorstep. We will build a doorstep, and we will place it in a location of our choosing, and we will force him to appear upon it!" I had not the faintest idea what he was talking about, but I knew that look. It was the look of Hercule Poirot when the hunt, at long last, had truly begun. *
________________________________________
Light Yagami looked at the grotesque creature perched on his bed with a carefully cultivated expression of detached curiosity. Inwardly, his mind was a whirlwind of calculation. A Shinigami. Ryuk. It was real. The final, missing piece of the puzzle had just appeared in his room, smelling faintly of dust and rot.
"So," Light began, his voice calm, "you've just been watching? All this time?"
"Pretty much," Ryuk cackled, crunching on an apple he'd produced from some unseen fold of his being. The sound was like bones breaking. "It's been more interesting than the last thousand years in my world, I'll give you that. You humans are a riot. So… why'd you do it? Start killing all these criminals?"
Light gave the creature a condescending smile. "Because the world is rotten," he said, the words of his divine mission flowing from him like scripture. "Someone had to do it. Someone had to cleanse the world of the evil that governments and police are too weak to touch. I was chosen."
"Uh-huh," Ryuk said, clearly unimpressed by the messianic rhetoric. "So you're getting rid of the boring ones first. Got it." He took another bite of his apple. "Humans are so interesting."
Light turned back to his desk, where a list of names was displayed on his monitor. He picked up his pen, the instrument of his godhood, and began the sacred work of judgment. He wrote a name, a corrupt financier, and then another, a human trafficker. He was about to write a third when a new sound intruded upon the quiet sanctity of his room.
It was the sound of sirens, a great many of them, wailing in the near distance, growing closer. It was a common enough sound in the city, but these were close. Very close. They seemed to be converging on the main road, just a few streets from his own house.
A commotion began to build—the sound of shouting, of car doors slamming. Ryuk floated over to the window, his yellow eyes wide with childish curiosity. "Ooh, looks like there's some action out there," the Shinigami rasped.
Light felt a flicker of annoyance at the interruption, but his own curiosity got the better of him. He walked to his window, which offered a clear, if slightly distant, view of the main thoroughfare. A small crowd was gathering. Police cars had formed a haphazard barricade. And in the centre of it all, a scene of classic, pathetic criminality was unfolding.
A man, his face contorted in a mask of desperate rage, was holding another man hostage. The criminal was large and brutish, and Light recognized him instantly from the news: a violent armed robber named Akio Tanaka, who had escaped from custody just two days prior. He had a large, wicked-looking knife pressed to the throat of his captive. The captive himself was a small, almost comically out-of-place figure: a Belgian man, impeccably dressed, with a magnificent, ridiculous moustache.
For a moment, Light simply observed. Then, the righteous, cleansing fire of his mission took hold. This was filth. This was chaos. This was a scene of public disorder happening practically on his own doorstep. It was an affront to the new, ordered world he was building.
He turned from the window, strode back to his desk, and with a hand that was as steady as stone, he wrote the criminal's name in the Death Note.
Akio Tanaka.
On the street, the brutish criminal's eyes suddenly went wide. The knife fell from his hand, clattering onto the pavement. He gasped, a look of profound, uncomprehending shock on his face, clutched his chest, and collapsed in a heap, dead before he hit the ground. A wave of shocked gasps and screams rippled through the crowd.
______________________________________
*
From a discreet position in a second-story window of a café across the street, I watched the entire, horrifying spectacle unfold. My heart was in my throat, a frantic, hammering drum against my ribs. I had watched as Poirot, my friend, had allowed himself to be taken hostage by a convicted killer, a man we had been forced to temporarily liberate from death row with a series of bribes and promises I preferred not to think about.
I had questioned the sanity of the plan a dozen times. "Poirot, it is too dangerous!" I had insisted. "The man is a killer! What if he does not follow the script? What if he panics?"
Poirot had simply looked at me, his gaze calm and certain. "He will follow the script, Hastings," he had said. "Because the alternative I have presented him with is far worse. Now, you will watch, and you will do nothing. Our fish must believe the bait is real."
And now, I had seen it. I had seen the man drop dead as if struck by a bolt of lightning from a clear blue sky. It was the most terrifying and miraculous thing I had ever witnessed. Medics, who were part of our plan, rushed in, whisking a perfectly unharmed Poirot away from the scene before the real police could ask any questions.
Later, back in the quiet of our suite, I looked at my friend, who was calmly sipping a hot chocolate as if he had just returned from a pleasant stroll. The cold, calculating light I had seen in his eyes in the park was back, and it unsettled me to my very core.
"It worked, then?" I asked, my voice still shaky.
"It worked beautifully, mon ami," he said, a thin, satisfied smile on his face. "We have learned two things of immense, incalculable value today." He held up a single, delicate finger. "One: Kira is not everywhere. He is a man, in a place. And that place is within a few hundred yards of where I stood. He is a local."
He held up a second finger. "And two, and this is the most important of all: he had to see me. He had to see the crime taking place. He did not kill the man in the prison. He waited until he was a public spectacle." He took a delicate sip of his chocolate, a look of pure, triumphant genius on his face. "We have taken his greatest strength, his anonymity, his god-like distance, and we have turned it into a leash. We now know his hunting ground. And we now know that our ghost… has eyes."
I looked at him, at the cool, confident mastermind who had just risked his own life in the most audacious gamble I had ever seen, and I wondered, with a sudden and profound sense of unease, if he was laughing inside. Laughing at the success of his plan, and at the man he was having to become in order to win this dreadful, impossible game.